ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to provide an overview of how curriculum has been understood and practiced in second language teaching. The most familiar types of curriculum are those that are designed to guide, monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of teaching. National and state curriculum documents are usually developed by specialists in the curriculum department in a ministry of education or a state planning agency. An institutional curriculum is often developed by a team of teachers with relevant experience and expertise and will often be based on a needs analysis of the different student groups or clients that the institution serves. In the product-focussed curriculum, testing has the role of assessment of learning while with the process curriculum a more dynamic role for assessment is assumed—;;assessment for learning—;;where teaching and assessment inform each other at every stage of the teaching/learning process. Reflective teaching refers to teaching that is accompanied by critical processing and review of practice.
